Municipal infrastructure — Our Collective Edge

Who this is for

Towns, councils, utilities and developers.

When a treatment field is failing or a waste contract is ending, the problem is rarely just the equipment — it is that nobody has looked at the whole loop. We design the loop: what comes in, what it becomes, and where it goes.

What you receive

The drawings, and everything that makes them buildable.

FeasibilityWhat the site can carry, what it would cost, and what happens if nothing changes.
Treatment designWater treatment and reuse specified for the volumes and the ground you have.
Waste strategyCollection through to end use — including turning waste streams into materials and soil.
Town-scale compostA facility design that gives every resident access to good soil, sized to the town.
The proposalDocumented to the standard a council, a committee or a public meeting can review.

We are a design practice. You are buying the plan — drawn, costed and phased. When you are ready to build it, we supervise while a licensed contractor does the work.

How we design it

The loop, not the equipment.

We read a town the way we read a parcel: where things arrive, where they accumulate, and where the system leaks. The engineering follows the diagnosis.

SurveyThe existing system walked and mapped as it actually runs, not as the drawings say it runs.

The loopInputs, outputs and losses drawn as one diagram, so the failure point is visible before anything is specified.

AnglesThe plan is walked from several angles and heights before it is committed, so the drawing matches how the place is actually used.

Process photography from Neal and Adriana lands in these slots as it is captured.

The record

We did not arrive at town scale from a textbook.

Lake Atitlán is a closed basin in Guatemala ringed by a dozen towns, and it has been failing for two decades. In 2009 the Global Nature Fund named it Threatened Lake of the Year. Everything that makes municipal work hard is present there at once: no budget, no enforcement, competing municipalities, and a lake that does not care whose jurisdiction the runoff started in.

Watershed work at town scaleSlowing water, stopping erosion, cleaning runoff and rebuilding the ecosystems that used to do that job for free — designed with landowners, communities and municipalities rather than around them.
Training local guardiansA watershed is only protected if the people living in it can maintain the work. Neal's programme trains local watershed guardians, which is the part most infrastructure projects skip and then wonder why the asset degrades.
Working with the political realityMultiple municipalities, no shared budget, and a public process that has to approve anything before it exists. We design to that constraint because it is the one we have actually worked in.
Waste as materialBetter trash management, and waste streams routed into materials and soil rather than out of sight — including trash turned into super-adobe structures.

The ongoing campaign, run through our partner CreaSol Permaculture: Save Lake Atitlán →

Start

Tell us what is failing.

Tell us what you are working with. It takes under two minutes.

Towns, councils, utilities and developers.

The drawings, and everything that makes them buildable.

The loop, not the equipment.

We did not arrive at town scale from a textbook.

Tell us what is failing.

Thank you — we'll be in touch.